So today let's talk about three big keys about the resumes.
Do and don'ts.
But really great techniques.
And I'm going to get into some really good detail here about what you should be thinking
about as you write your resume.
And where this came from, I don't know if some of you caught it, yesterday I did a morning
talk show, one of the popular morning TV shows called The Jam in Chicago.
They're going through jobs month in September.
The producer called me a week or so ago, wanted me to come on the show, which is tons of fun.
I love doing the morning talk shows.
And he looked at me and he said "Hey, we've got jobs month going on.
My executive producer told me I needed to call you.
I looked at your stuff.
You talk about everything.
Is there anything in particular that you want to speak to our audience about?"
And I said "Yeah.
Resumes.
People hate writing resumes.
It's terrible.
It's difficult to do.
People have lots of problems articulating themselves in the best light.
Let's talk about that."
He said "Great.
Give me three points."
So I did.
Now, I talked about them yesterday over a maybe three or four minute clip.
But today you're going to get tons of detail on them.
Let's get rolling.
The first thing that I want to talk about with resume writing is you need to know how
someone looks at your resume.
How somebody looks at your resume.
Now a lot of you that have been following me for a while, you know I got a lot of stuff
out there on resumes, we've got videos, I've got a great webinar, I've done a number of
other special things related to the resume, but resumes are not read left to right and
top to bottom.
People don't read resumes like they read a book.
Keep in mind what the employer is going through or probably the recruiter or some human resource
official, is opening up a resume, looking at it very, very, very quickly.
The first place their eyes go is to the top center of the resume.
They're just trying to get a feel for who you are.
So I want to talk about what that means for you.
If their eyes go to the top center of the resume initially, it's like your smile, it's
like the first thing that they see.
Are you smiling, beaming bright, saying you are going to love looking at my resume?
Or are you going to fall flat?
And I'm going to show you a few samples of what the top of a resume could look like.
But this is really important that you grab their attention first.
So top center, top center, top center.
You need to be thinking about what is that going to look like.
Now, this is so critical.
Actually I want to spend a lot of our talk today on what to do, what not to do.
First thing, let's talk about what not to do.
What not to do.
Under no circumstances, it doesn't matter if you're a college student or a pro, do not
include an objective statement.
I have absolutely no idea where objective statements came from.
None mind you.
Because it would never make sense to me at any point in our existence why anybody would
put something that they want on a document intended to show what you offer.
So an objective statement is typically what is your objective in seeking this job, in
your career, whatever it might be.
There's no place anywhere in the resume for that.
There're other vehicles that you can use.
The email or the cover letter or some other things.
But definitely no objective statement and for both of you, students and professionals,
your education should also not be the first thing somebody sees.
They'll get to it soon enough.
Even if you're a college student.
Resist the temptation to put your education at the top.
Your degree is not a voucher to anything anymore.
You need more.
Employers are looking for more.
So you got to give them more upfront before they get to your education.
The other thing that you shouldn't do is don't go right into the current company that you
are working for.
And I'll explain in detail why we don't want to do this.
But if this is your place to shine and show them who you are in all your glory, at least
at a summary level, starting with where you're currently working is just going to answer
the question where are you now.
And then they're going to have to look through the rest of the resume to figure out who you
really are.
So don't put your company in there.
We're going to talk a little bit more about that.
I'll give you some more clarity on that.
Don't put tables.
Don't put tables anywhere in your resume, but especially not at the top.
Especially not at the top.
Tables are boring.
They oftentimes don't include the right information.
Applicant tracking systems don't like them.
So don't put tables up at the top.
And whatever you do, and nowhere in the resume, but especially not at the top, should you
be putting any opinions about yourself.
So these are things like those meaningless buzzwords that say that you are detail oriented,
a strong communicator, a leader, or whatever it is that you think you are and may very
well be.
But on a resume you need evidence to back that up.
So don't put those words anywhere.
We want you to put evidence inside the resume so that you can show the employer that you
are a detail oriented person, great leader, organized, or whatever it might be.
So those are things that I don't want you to do.
Now I want to talk a little bit more about conceptually what's going on at the top of
the resume.
Some people think "Well, I need to have a lot of white space there.
It's more pleasing on the eye.
People have a difficult time, if there's a lot of text there, skimming the text.
And I've been told that I should list my skills at the top and all that stuff."
Now let me answer a few of these for you very specifically.
I want to actually show you a little something about skimming.
And I thought this might be a pretty decent way to do that.
Look at this sentence.
I bet it doesn't take you but a mere two seconds to read that.
Or that.
Can you make that out?
If you can make that out give me a hey in the chat or something.
Say whatever you want.
But I'm guessing that you could read that sentence no problem.
Absolutely no problem.
Let me go back to my face for a second.
I'm assuming you can read that.
Imagine what a trained recruiter can do with a few seconds when those words are spelled
correctly and they see hundreds of resumes a day, day in day out for years and years
and years.
So you guys get my point.
If I know what I'm looking for and you are giving me the right kind of context to frame
it, I can pick that up in a nanosecond.
So trust me when I tell you, this is what I'm talking about.
Now imagine these samples I'm going to show you and I want you to just for a second think
about how you feel just about the way they look and the content that you're going to
see.
Let me switch back here.
But let's take a look at John Smith.
What do you know about this guy?
He's a Senior Project Manager.
See all that other stuff.
Look at all that.
To me, those three words he put there senior project manager was really all I needed to
know.
It was all I needed to know because all that other stuff below is stuff that any project
manager would know.
Especially a Senior Project Manager.
I already know that.
So I wouldn't even spend any time looking at it.
What about my girl Jane here?
Look at Jane's profile.
So in Jane's instance ... Now I want you to also cut me some slack here because I had
to frame these together and I made the font bigger at the top because I had more real
estate to do that.
But assuming that all of these were the same font and you took a look at Jane's profile.
Look at her.
So when I look at this, I can see Senior Project Manager on the left.
Information technology, Fortune 500, financial, healthcare, software development, 500K, two
mil, 525.
I could get all of that in one or two seconds and I know I am going to absolutely love looking
at this resume.
Now, below that she has this core competencies paragraph.
If you see that.
Notice how in John Smith's case with the table, I just listed all the exact same 12 things.
Now, here's the interesting part.
In John Smith's case I just blew by it.
In Jane's case she held me up at the top because I really wanted to kind of soak in that first
paragraph because it looked like the way the text reads is that she's got rich words in
there.
I can already tell there's more factual words and interesting words rather than those buzzwords
in there.
The second paragraph.
I want to go back to me.
The second paragraph in the Jane Doe one where she had the two little paragraphs.
I wouldn't even have read that.
That's okay.
That's not the point.
She already had my attention.
And she had laid the foundation which if I would have read the second paragraph would
have made the second paragraph believable to me.
John Smith, he didn't do any such thing.
He gave me nothing, so I have to go by that.
So now he basically wasted two and a half inches of his resume telling me nothing.
Some people, however, might read Jane's second paragraph with the core competencies.
They might look to see does she have anything out of the ordinary?
But you know who's going to read that paragraph 100% of the time?
The computer.
The applicant tracking system.
Remember resumes are not solely for people.
They are for hopefully people.
That's the goal is to get them to the person and then to wow them and then to get the interview,
but you also, a lot of you, are going to have to get them past the applicant tracking system.
Well the applicant tracking system is going to pick up the second paragraph of the second
example.
Jane's example.
The applicant tracking system is not going to recognize the bullets in the hidden table
that's inside the Microsoft Word doc that you looked at.
So applicant tracking systems don't like tables.
They don't like graphics.
They don't like acronyms.
They don't like a lot of these things.
The research has shown this.
And a lot of the tools that are out there support this and educate us on that.
So my experience of looking at over a half a million resumes tells me the second one
works more effectively.
My informal interviews with hundreds of companies who are my clients tell me that.
The surveys that we run with side-by-side samples of resumes and ask people to choose
the preferred format tell me this.
And the applicant tracking system tells us this.
This is why the top center of the resume is so important.
And if you think for one second that you are repeating yourself, Jane Doe put together
a profile that immediately got me excited, gave me a frame of reference for what I'm
about to read and she put my bias on the positive side because now I'm excited.
John Smith on the other hand put me to sleep.
And when I have to go through all these resumes if I'm a human resources person or a recruiter
working for a company and I'm getting all these, it's not exciting to me.
I'm not in a great mood when I get down to the rest of your resume.
But Jane gets the benefit of the doubt.
So you get to control the narrative plus for all of you career changers, for all of you
that are staying within the same types of jobs, but maybe you want to get back to your
roots or something that you did three years ago or eight years ago, you can pull a lot
of this stuff forward.
This is why it's so important to have a career profile.
You get to say whatever you want to say up top.
So the top center.
Stay away from those things that I told you to avoid and this is more in line with what
I would do at the top center.
All right.
Let's talk about point number two.
There're lots of formats that are out there and I favor, always have, always will favor,
the chronological format.
And I guess technically, specifically I mean the reverse chronological format for the work
experience section of your resume or the professional experience section.
Whatever it may be.
That simply means you've got the company name at kind of the top left of that section, then
maybe you have a little line or two about what the company does and what you're doing
within the company, then your title, then your responsibilities, and then your previous
title and those responsibilities, and so on.
And then the further back you go in time, those companies, list those out in order as
well so that your first company or the longest ago company that you have on your resume,
whenever you decide to cut your resume, is at the bottom.
There are other types of resumes.
You guys have probably seen them or heard of them.
The skills based resume or the functional resume.
The skills based resume highlight those features you have.
So in John Smith's example where he has project management or quality assurance testing or
whatever, he might call those out and then highlight the companies that he worked at
where he actually gained those skills.
The reason that those styles, those layouts are ineffective is number one, the second
question that an employer has after who are you is where are you.
Think about it.
I know a lot of you are senior people.
You're in my programs.
You're in my community.
You follow me.
You email me.
And you comment on my stuff.
And I know you're in your 40s and your 50s and your 60s.
And a lot of you are hiring people.
Think about when you get a functional resume.
What's the first question you want to know?
Where are they now or where were they most recently?
And it's very difficult to tell.
So employers, hirers, HR people, recruiters, whoever it is, they like to see that chronological
order.
Shows them the evolution.
The other thing that the skills based or the functional based resumes do is they put suspicion
in the mind of the recruiter like you're trying to hide something from me.
As a matter a fact, I kid you not, when I get a functional resume, the first thing that
goes through my head is I now start looking at what are they trying to hide?
That's actually where my attention goes.
So think about that.
You've now put me in a position where I'm looking for something bad like a gap in employment.
I don't mind if you have a gap in employment.
Show me where it is.
So just really, really stick to the chronology.
It's much easier.
It's much easier for everybody to follow.
Now, third point that I want to make is about the way in which you articulate yourself in
the bullets themselves or the sentences that you write, whether it's in the career profile
or I also recommend a career highlights section for those of you that have the Andy Lacivita
template.
But I also want you to focus on your accomplishments and your benefits.
And I'm going to give you a little sample on the PowerPoint here of what I mean.
But employers, and I say this a lot in my resume writing programs, that it's not just
good enough to show them what you did, employers want to know what you did, but they really
want to know what happened as a result of what you did.
What happened as a result of what you did?
So let me give an example.
I'm going to flip back here to the screen and let's leave Jane and John here.
So if you manage the customer service department with 10 employees ... I see a lot of resumes
that say I manage the customer service department with 10 employees.
What doesn't this tell me?
Are you a good manager?
Do your people get promoted?
Do they love you?
Actually are your customers happier?
Have you done anything to streamline those processes or whatever?
So this probably has some place on the resume.
It could probably be broken up, it could be buried, it could be up in the summaries, but
I would much rather see a bullet that said something like I raised customer satisfaction
33% by designing and implementing processes that reduced time to answer customer inquiries
by half.
I put something in place.
I put something in place that made our customers a lot happier.
Because it only takes two minutes to get back to them or they only have to stay on hold
two minutes and I can answer the question in two minutes instead of eight.
So these are the kinds of things that I think are very, very important for you to get onto
your resume.
Whether you're putting them in the highlights section, which you should be, and putting
them in the professional experience section, which you should be.
Do's and don'ts.
If you focus on making sure that the top center of your resume sings and gets people excited
to read it, you make sure that you lay it out in a great format chronologically that's
easy for them to see what hopefully is a nice career evolution for you and there's tons
of ways we can handle all your exceptions and I've got a video out there on every single
one of them.
So you can find it whatever your issue is.
And the third thing that I would do is I'd make sure your focusing on your accomplishments
and your benefits in addition to what your responsibilities are.
All right.
Hope you enjoyed that.
There was no way I was getting all that in in three and a half minutes or four minutes
or whatever my little TV segment was yesterday, but I wanted to bring it to you, my people,
because I get to be the executive producer, the talent, the sound engineer, and everything
else related to Thursday Live Office Hours with Andy.
So if you're loving this give me a thumbs up, give me thumbs-